Architects of emortality

All this, even Charlotte’s unschooled eyes could see, was the work of a young man. However many years Rappaccini/Moreau had lived, however many he had spent in glorious isolation in the midst of all this strange fecundity, he had never grown old and never grown wise. All this was Folly: unashamed and unapologetic Folly. This was not the work of a man grown mournful in forgetfulness, obsessed with the pursuit of a vanishing past; this was the work of a man whose only thought was of the future: of novelty, of ambition, of progress. Perhaps Walter Czastka’s illegal experiment had not been such an abject failure after all; perhaps the transformation it had wrought had merely been subtler than its designer had intended.

This was Moreau’s island—morrow’s island—but the child that had been father to the man who became Moreau had itself been fathered, and created. Perhaps this ought to be reckoned Walter Czastka’s Eden too, at least as much as the one into which he had poured the futile labor of his dotage.

Charlotte no longer needed the advice of Oscar Wilde’s interpretations. Whatever resonances of the distant past might have evaded her youthful ignorance, she felt that she understood the present heart of the little world which surrounded her, and the kind of soul which hovered invisibly in every molecular skein of it all.

Yes, it was truly beautiful, and fabulous and mad—but the truth, the beauty, the fabulousness, and the madness were the work of a true Creationist.

In the heart of Moreau’s island, Charlotte expected to find a house, but there was no house there. Once, no doubt, there had been a dwelling place on the site—a laboratory and a workshop, a palace and a forge, a refuge and a hatchery—but all of that had been banished now, buried underground if not actually dismantled.

Now, there was only a mausoleum.

Charlotte knew that Moreau had died in Honolulu, but she also recalled that his body had been returned to the island, where someone with no official existence must have taken delivery of it and laid it in this tomb. Charlotte assumed that it would not be allowed to remain here, but it was here now: the mortal centerpiece of Moreau’s Creation.

It was a very large tomb, hewn from a white marble whose austerity stood in imperious contrast to the fabulous forest around it. There was nothing overelaborate about its formation, although it was tastefully decorated. It bore neither cross nor carven angel, but on the plain white flank which loomed above its pediment a text was inscribed. It read: SPLEEN Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres-vieux, Qui, de ses precepteurs meprisant les courbettes, S’e

Le savant qui lui fait de 1’or n’a jamais pu De son étre extirper 1’element corrompu, Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Remains nous vie

“Baudelaire?” Charlotte asked of Oscar Wilde. “Of course,” he replied. “Would you like me to translate?” “If you would.” “It runs approximately thus,” he said.

“I am like the monarch of a rain-soaked realm,” “Rich but powerless, young but perhaps too old, “Who, despising the sycophancy of his teachers,” “Is as sick of his dogs as of all other beasts.

“Nothing can enliven him, neither prey, nor predator,” “Nor deaths displayed before his balcony.

“The satirical ballads of his appointed fool” “No longer soothe the frown of his cruel malady; “His flower-decked couch is transformed into a tomb,” “And the courtesans for whom every prince is handsome, “Can no longer find attire sufficiently immodest,” “To force this youthful skeleton to smile.

“The maker of alchemical gold has never contrived” “To extirpate elementary corruption from his own being, “And in those baths of blood which the Romans left to us, “Which powerful men recall in the days of their old age,” “He has failed to renew the warmth of that dazed cadaver “Where runs instead of blood the green water of forgetfulness.” “Spleen, I assume, does not here refer to the common or garden organ of that name?” said Michael Lowenthal.

“It does not,” Wilde confirmed. “Its meaning here is one that was rendered obsolete by the modern medical theories which replaced the ancient lore of bodily humors. Spleen was the aggravated form of the decadents’ e

“I doubt it. This paradise was not born of bitterness or resentment, although the trail of murders that paved our way with bad intentions must have been. The poem is a commentary on the artist’s final approach to death, not on his life as a whole. Spleen was what Moreau fought with all his might to resist, although he knew that he could not live forever, and that it would claim him in the end.

Like us, dear Charlotte, he was delivered by history to the very threshold of true emortality, and yet was fated not to live in the Promised Land. How he must have resented the fading of the faculties which had produced all this! How he must have hated the knowledge that his creative powers were ebbing away! How wrathful he must have become, to see his fate mirrored in the faces and careers of all those who had a hand in his own Creation. While the true emortals emerge from the womb of biotechnical artifice, today and tomorrow—and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—they can no longer care who their fathers are or might have been, for they are designed by men like gods, from common chromosomal clay.” He looked at Michael Lowenthal as he pronounced the final sentence—but Michael Lowenthal looked away rather than meet the geneticist’s accusing stare.

Charlotte looked around, wondering where the red-haired woman might be—and wondering, now, exactly what the red-haired woman might be. She was a clone of Maria Inacio, and yet not quite a clone. Some of her genes had been modified by engineering while she was still an ovum—just as some of her son/father’s genes had been modified by the young Walter Czastka. She, like her own Creator, had been designed by a man trying to become like a god, from common chromosomal clay—but Gustave Moreau must have done everything within his power to surpass Walter Czastka in that regard. The woman must surely be a Natural, in the limited sense that Michael Lowenthal was, but how much more had Moreau tried to make of her? Charlotte remembered some words that Moreau, as Herod, had quoted at Oscar Wilde, teasing him with the charge that even he could not have encountered them before: “Mortality, Behold and Fear! What a change of flesh is here!” But the woman was a multiple murderess; when the law took its course, her career would surely be subject to a demolition as comprehensive and as brutal as the one to which this exotic demi-Eden would be subject.

Charlotte knew, as she framed that thought, that it might not be quite as simple as that. Oscar Wilde, for one, would fight for the preservation of Moreau’s island—and how many allies would he find among the millions of watchers who were waiting for her to locate and arrest her suspect? How many allies might the lovely murderess find, even in a world where death was regarded with such intense loathing and fascination? While Michael Lowenthal was still making shift to avoid Oscar Wilde’s stare, Charlotte moved away from them to make a tour of the massive mausoleum.